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They are a french nonprofit - the laws of the USA do not apply to them. What you believe will happen with SOPA does not affect whether they are breaking any laws today.

The US government is shutting down foreign sites now. It happened a few days ago, when they shut down some Korean video sharing sites.

ICE doesn't seem to care where they operate. France has been all too eager to assist the US "MAFIAA" right down to the three strikes and you're booted off the internet law. I'm not sure how safe being in France makes them. They're probably safe until the US government either asks France to do something about them or until the US government acts unilaterally by deleting or seizing the VLC domain names and blocking financial contributions from Americans.

Someone mentioned cash in the mail a few posts back. The funny thing is that with all the "terrorism" laws, the US government can simply state that you're not allowed to donate to someone they don't like, and if you do, you've broken the law.

Go ahead and explain where France's Three Strikes law came from. It wasn't to protect any industry in France.

Go ahead and explain where France's Three Strikes law came from. It wasn't to protect any industry in France.

LOL. You seem to have the idea that everything revolves around the USA. So this may come as a surprise to you, but France does have its own tv shows, writers, directors, movies and musicians. And yes this law is there to protect their own industry.

When SOPA passes (and some form of it will), the United States will probably attack VLC through the ITA and do a wikileak's style defunding blockade by not allowing credit card, paypal, etc. donations to VLC. we'll see if this is an "American" problem then.

SOPA probably won't pass, the whole thing is a facade so we don't notice the less extreme (but still bad ) PIPA.

I should also mention that libdvdcss might not be a DMCA violation since it is not cracking anything. DVD CSS was not meant as "content protection", it was intended to make sure that DVD players had to pay licensing fees to the DVD Forum and therefore also support User Backstabbing Operations.

Hollywood disagrees, and has previously sued people under this argument. It doesn't matter whether encryption is effective or not, the law only says that it must be present.

libdvdcss doesn't crack anything, it simply shotguns the weak 40 bit cipher with random possible keys until one works

And to head off this argument at the pass: DMCA does use the phrase "effectively controls access", but it merely means "has the effect of controlling access" (which is defined elsewhere in the bill in very broad terms), not "does a good job of controlling access".